How to track your website's progress on Google Analytics

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In a world where nearly everything is trackable, finding data to
inform important business decisions is simple. Shaping that data
into a story that makes sense for your business, however, is not as
easy.

This tutorial will show you how to define and set goals in
Google Analytics, a
powerful tool for tracking user behavior on your website. First
step: decide what you want to achieve.

What is a KPI?

A KPI, or Key Performance Indicator, is a measurable way to
track your success. Not to be confused with your goals, a KPI is
the telltale signal of whether you are reaching your goals. For
example, if you want to create a website that is easy to use, one
good KPI to test your success is a low bounce rate.

What KPIs should I use?

These will vary based on your goals, but good KPIs for online
business include:

Unique visitors (the number of individual people who have
viewed your site)

Total visitors (the number of times your site has been
viewed)

Page views (the total number of pages consumed by all your
visitors)

Visit duration (how long someone stays on your site)

Conversion rate (the percentage of visits that leads to a
transaction)

Bounce rate (how many people visited your website and then left
before clicking on anything else)

New vs. returning visitors (visitors who have never been to
your website vs. those who come back for more)

Abandonment rate (how many online shopping carts are abandoned
rather than purchased)

Average value of online transaction

Mailing list signups

How do I know if I’m reaching my goals?

Ah, here we are at the heart of the matter. Before we set up
goals, make sure that you have signed up for Google
Analytics and have the tracking code
installed on your website.

Now that this is done we can get to the good stuff.

Log into Analytics and go to “All Website Data” for your site.
Once you’re in the reporting dashboard (below) go to “Conversions”
on the left hand column, then “Goal URLs” and then click on the
“Set up goals” button.

If you don’t have any goals set up yet, click on the “CREATE A
GOAL” button.

You have two options when creating a new goal. The first is to
use a template generated by Google. These templates are based on
your website’s category and will include different goals relevant
to your particular industry. You can also just create a custom
goal, which is what I’ll do here.

Once you get to the “Goal description” section, you can name
your goal and choose how you’d like to measure it. There are four
different goal types: “Destination”, “Duration”, “Pages/Screens per
visit” and “Event”. For my goal, I’m going to use “Destination” to
see how many people view the “About” page on my new blog. You can
also use “Destination” to track a landing page that people see
every time they complete a desired action, such as purchasing an
item or signing up for an email list.

“Duration” is a simple setup, and will tally all visitors who
view your site for at least a specified amount of time. Similarly,
“Pages/Screens per visit” will tally all your site’s visitors who
view a specified amount of pages. “Event” is a powerful tool for
tracking where people click on your website, but this is a more
complicated setup. Unless you are fairly proficient at programming,
you will probably need a developer’s help.

Since I chose to use “Destination” the setup below is just for
destination goals. First, type in the URL you want to track. You
won’t type in the full URL, just everything that comes after your
homepage address (for example, “/about”). Select “Equals to” in the
drop down menu for an exact match to this URL, and leave the “case
sensitive” box unchecked.

Another helpful feature of Google Analytics is the ability to
track this goal’s value. For example, if you know that an average
online sale is worth about $10, you can put this in the value field
when you are tracking a sales confirmation page. If you don’t know
the value this particular action is worth to you, leave this option
toggled “off”.

With “Funnel”, you can track where people are coming from in
your site to get to the desired page. In the example below, I want
to see how many people view my “Archive” page and then go directly
to my “About” page.

Finally, you can verify your goal to see how many people have
performed this action on your website in the past seven days. It
may be far higher or lower than you expect, so it’s a good idea to
take a look and make sure your goal is realistic.

Congratulations, you’ve just set your first
goal! If you’d like to learn more, Google has a great checklist
for getting the most out of its analytics. Let us know below if
this tutorial is helpful for you and which goals you like to use to
benchmark your site.

Jen Wulf is the community manager for American Express's OPEN Forum, a social network for small business owners and entrepreneurs. Previously, she worked as a content writer for education tech startup, General Assembly, and as a beat reporter for American newspapers. Jen also holds a liberal arts degree from the University of Notre Dame in the United States. You can follow her on Twitter at @itsjenwulf.